In recent years, there has been an increasing use of compact, pocket-size electronic personal organizers or personal digital assistants (“PDA”) that store personal scheduling information such as appointments, tasks, phone numbers, flight schedules, alarms, birthdays, and anniversaries. PDA's come in all different shapes and sizes as well as being incorporated into wireless telephones, wireless pagers and wrist watches. Some of the more common PDA's, like the Samsung Galaxy or iPad, are equipped with a touch screen for navigation and input of information. Some models even have an attachable input keyboard with both numeric keys and alphabetic keys, as well as special function keys. PDA's may also incorporate a liquid crystal display (LCD) which displays data, text and graphics.
PDA's prove most useful to busy individuals who are frequently traveling or always on the move from one meeting to the next appointment. Unfortunately, due to their hectic schedules, these individuals are the people most likely to forget their PDA's during the frantic rush to gather documents, files, laptops, cellular phones, and travel tickets before departing home or office for their destinations. As such, a desire exists to reduce the number of electronic digital devices that individuals need to remember for business or personal purposes.
With the development of digital watches over the last twenty years, watches have been used to perform a variety of different functions, including games, calculator, various timers, alarms, and sport-related time-keeping functions. Support of these additional functions has required more complicated user interface solutions, which have tended towards an increasing number of push buttons. Watches are now capable of serving as personal information managers, wireless phones, and contain other advanced functionalities, which has required an entirely new user interface solution to simplify user operation. Likewise, digital watches have evolved to the point that the digital watches can function as PDA's. Like the pocket-size devices described above, such watches can be programmed with certain key appointments, tasks, phone numbers, flight schedules, alarms, birthdays, and anniversaries. Watches are part of everyday fashion attire, are more ruggedized, and more convenient to carry and less likely to be forgotten by busy people.
However, data is more difficult to enter into a watch than to enter the same data into a PDA. This difficulty is due in large part to the limited space for input buttons and display characters available on digital wristwatches. Most watches are limited to having only three or four input buttons. A user programs a watch by depressing one or more buttons several times to cycle through various menu options. Once an option is selected, the user depresses another button or buttons to input the desired information. These input techniques are inconvenient and difficult to remember. Such techniques are particularly inconvenient when a wearer wishes to enter an entire month's schedule. Although watches have been made with larger numbers of input keys, such watches are usually much too large for comfort, and tend to be particularly unattractive.
Apart from personal organizers, many people maintain appointment calendars and task lists on PDA's, personal computers (PCs) or cell phones. One example of time management software on the PC is Microsoft's OUTLOOK and on PDA's and cell phones the Palm OS operating system which maintain daily appointment schedules, to-do lists, personal notes, and calendar planning for personal computers. This information is often a duplicate of that maintained on the portable personal organizer, such as the various models produced by Microsoft, Palm and HandSpring.
Today, watches utilize technology for transferring information from a personal computer to a watch.
One of the drawbacks in remotely programming small-size PDA's and watches is that there is no convenient way to easily transfer data between a laptop or PDA and a wristwatch. Instead, entire data sets must be carefully entered by the user during each programming session. If a data entry error is made or the user wishes to make a change, the user must fix the error or make the change at the wrist watch utilizing miniature control inputs. Another drawback is the relatively large power consumption requirements of small PDA's and watches with touch screen data manipulation. Prior art devices require a microcontroller and processor to function a majority of the time in order to keep the PDA or watch properly functioning. Naturally, this results in a shortened battery life span for these devices.